Terrible engineering culture and utter lack of leadership - Senior Software Engineer Rakuten Employee Review

- Utter lack of executive leadership; the founder has vague visions of grandeur (mostly parrotted from elsewhere, though) but there is no actual direction or strategy - Engineering culture that resist change at all costs; no accountability for system failures, no serious post-mortem analysis and improvements; security is best effort - Organic, spontaneuos collaboration between teams is not encouraged; duplication of effort ("reinventing the wheel") is rampant - No remote work or flexible time options are provided (except in health-related circumstances), even though most of the time there is absolutely no need to be physically present in the office - No career development to speak of; HR lately has been saying they want to improve but it basically boils down to provide some training courses. In general HR is completely detached from the reality of the problems that employee witness. As a result turnover is very high, almost every day you get mail from people that are leaving the company (normally the ones that are for making improvements to the status quo; after clashing with the engineering culture they move on, leaving behind the ones that are OK with the status quo) - Most middle management is Japanese, breaking through the ceiling normally requires knowing Japanese even though all communication is supposed to be carried out in English - Office is overcrowded, all meeting rooms are always fully booked even though often they remain unused - Business outlook is not positive. Stock lost 50% of its value in the last year. - Salary is not competitive with many IT companies (both Japanese and foreign) in the area (often in the range of 15-30% less, but can be higher)